Wednesday, January 25, 2012

You say you're going to show up between 1-6 (an outrageous 5 hour time window) then show up somewhere in that time window.

Don't call me to squeeze me in at 12:30 because I will be getting Subway and the whole thing will become a mess.

Also I'm sure I have written this before but ALL cable/internet service providers are the worst. There literally is not one good one and I have tried them all from Time Warner to DirectTV and even some company that only exists in Miami. They all suck. Balls.

This time in bad cable guy service we were told they were coming between 1-6 (note the standard time window) and that they would call us 30 mins before they got here.

We never got a call until they had already left because we weren't there. Why weren't we there? Because it was 12:00 and our appt time (which they gave us) wasn't til 1. Then to add insult to injury, they told us they couldn't reschedule us until next Monday.

Then I yelled and was a bad customer and we got cable installed yesterday, with only minor inconvenience/incompetence.

Which brings me to my final point I want to make to big corporations: Stop rewarding people for bad behavior. In most companies that deal with the public (cell phones, hotels, cable) the only way to get them to help you is to be an asshole and make a big fuss. When you do that you get rewarded with money off your cell phone bill, room upgrades or sooner appointments.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a fucked up system that basically guarantees an adversarial relationship with customers?

What's worse is that the reason companies do this is to save money and time. They want to spend as little time as possible on each customer under the assumption that most people will just go along with shitty stuff because it's easier than making a stink which ironically is how you get what you want.

Anyway i'm just venting now, but I do think there's some point to the idea that all customer service industries need to reform their policies and practices to make things better for people who don't make a big deal out of things.

4 comments:

I think part of the problem is how they outsource customer service (and tech support, and billing, etc) and keep only the most necessary stuff (i.e. installation and repair) in house.

I used to work at one of the call centers that takes the internet service calls for Comcast. We were several hundred miles away from most of the people who were calling us, and we had this automated system for helping people who had trouble with their internet conntection.

First, we'd ask them to reset their modem. Then, if that didn't work, we'd go through a series of screens asking them to try all these different techniques to get their internet working. If none of those worked, we'd finally go to a screen that let us set up an appointment with an actual comcast service team. We would set the date and time for the team to come, but we had no way of actually contacting the local comcast office to see what THEIR availability was, so we were basically just picking a random time that was in no way guaranteed to fit into the Comcast techies' schedule.

Another thing is that it was pretty standard operating procedure to give credits and stuff to customers who threw tantrums. So yeah, definitely, rewarding shitty behavior was a big part of it.

Anyway, the big takeaway point here is that the actual cable guy himself may not have been that incompetent. The VAST majority of these problems lay squarely with the idiots on the phone. Your cable guy is given a scheduled slot from some high school student who is probably half illiterate, and he has no real way of getting in touch with said illiterate to straighten the thing out. The people who work at these call centers are seriously dumb as fuck, and they talk shit about the callers all day when they're not on calls.

The whole process is so piecemeal and bureaucratic, though, that you can never really get ahold of the guy who needs his head beaten in (which is inevitably some call center manager half a world away).

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